"The driver isn’t optimized for gaming.
I saw this pop up a lot during our stream yesterday, that the driver isn’t meant for gaming so it hasn’t been optimized for gaming. Instead, it’s only targeting “professional” level applications. First, that’s not the case and AMD has confirmed that. The driver has all the gaming optimizations that the other Radeon drivers would include up until at least the driver branching mentioned above. After that time, optimizations may or may not have made it in, as AMD tells it.
The games we are using for this review were not released in the last 30 days or anything like that. GTA V, Rise of the Tomb Raider, Witcher 3; these are all games that have been out for some time, were around for AMD to address in both Radeon RX 500 and Vega-series drivers for many, many months.
The one caveat to this is that the Vega architecture itself is still unoptimized in the driver. But this would affect gaming and non-gaming workloads most of the time. So if the driver isn’t ready for ANYTHING, then that’s a valid concern, but it applies to ALL workloads and not just games."
That is basically saying that we don't care that the driver was not optimized for Vega. These are old games and it should work well with it anyway. However driver updates work in conjunction with game updates in many cases if the driver writers aren't being lazy. That means that since this driver, that not only isn't optimized for the Vega architecture, but isn't even the latest available driver available for all Amd cards, would naturally perform worse than its full potential.
